Unsolicited Press Announces the Release of Stolen: Love and Loss in the Time of COVID-19 by Elizabeth Jaeger
Unsolicited Press is honored to publish Stolen: Love and Loss in the Time of COVID-19 ($22.95), a memoir by Elizabeth Jaeger that captures, with heartbreaking intimacy, the devastating impact of the pandemic on one family.
In March 2020, as COVID-19 swept through New York City, Elizabeth Jaeger began recording the day-to-day reality of her father’s battle with the disease. Stolen is a raw, unflinching diary of grief and resilience, carrying readers through the shock, helplessness, and eventual acceptance of his untimely death. Interwoven with vignettes from happier times—her father as a doting dad, an adoring grandfather, a man whose life revolved around family—the memoir offers both a deeply personal chronicle and a universal reminder of the human cost of a global crisis.
Early praise underscores the power and necessity of Jaeger’s work:
[Jaeger] does an exemplary job of weaving together a cohesive narrative from a jumble of pivotal emotions, experiences, influences, and memories during a time of extreme uncertainty. She includes vivid details of her once private emotional truths. While most people will have some degree of familiarity with her story, future generations will learn of the utter devastation that COVID-19 left in its wake. Stolen is a heartbreaking work of one woman’s reality, and one family’s loss, that serves as an example of what many people lived. With an unflinching ability to put her heart on the page, Stolen, is a work that is needed to document not only the atrocities that ravaged us six years ago, but also the way we worked through the devastation and how we continue to do so. —Florence Osmund
Stolen is a heartbreaking work of one woman’s reality, and one family’s loss, that serves as an example of what many people lived. With an unflinching ability to put her heart on the page, Stolen, is a work that is needed to document not only the atrocities that ravaged us six years ago, but also the way we worked through the devastation and how we continue to do so. —Laura Gaddis
March 2020, New York City. A vivid day-for-day diary that gives a rare insight into the lives of one woman, her son, her mother, and her wife as they deal with the complexities of the new mystery disease, Covid. With the turning of each page, we witness their sorrow, their anger and helplessness as they must watch as her father ultimately dies an untimely and lonely death. Emotional and gripping, this is a beautifully written testament to how a global disaster can affect us on a most personal level. It is a story no one should forget. —Kerstin Lieff, author of Letters from Berlin and The Wolf Children of the Eastern Front
With precision and tenderness, Jaeger gives voice to the immeasurable losses of the pandemic while preserving the memory of her father’s life and love. Stolen is not only a family’s story of heartbreak but also a vital document of an era that reshaped the world.
About the Author
Elizabeth Jaeger’s essays, short stories, reviews, and poetry have appeared in Margate Bookie, Caustic Frolic, The Blue Nib, Capsule Stories, Watchung Review, Ovunque Siamo, and Italian Americana. A chapter from her novel-in-progress was published in Newtown Literary. Jaeger holds an MFA in creative writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University and an MA in history from William Paterson University. She teaches history at Perth Amboy High School and lives in New Jersey with her wife, son, and three cats. More at www.elizabethjaegerauthor.com and on TikTok @PapaJaegerTheOwl.
Book Details
Title: Stolen: Love and Loss in the Time of COVID-19
Author: Elizabeth Jaeger
Genre: Nonfiction (Memoir)
Publication Date: September 16, 2025
Price: $22.95
ISBN: 978-1-963115-49-9
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
Purchase Link: https://www.unsolicitedpress.com/shop/p/stolen-jaeger
